How many UK businesses open and close each year

About 317,000 UK businesses opened in 2024. About 280,000 closed. That is roughly one opening every 100 seconds, and one closing not far behind it. Here is what those two numbers are made of, and what they tell you about the market you sell into.

Watch: Eighty-three thousand doors closed

Two numbers describe the UK business world better than almost any others. How many firms opened last year, and how many shut. In 2024 about 317,000 opened and about 280,000 closed. That is one new business roughly every 100 seconds of the working year, and one closing not far behind it.

Those numbers come from the Office for National Statistics. They are free, they are public, and almost nobody selling to businesses ever looks at them. This post explains what they actually count, what they say about different trades, and how to use them.

The short answer

In 2024 there were about 317,000 business openings and about 280,000 closings in the UK, out of roughly 2.86 million active businesses.

The ONS calls these births and deaths. As rates, that is an opening rate of 11.1% and a closing rate of 9.8%. So a little over one in ten businesses on the list was new, and a little under one in ten dropped off it.

The gap between the two is small. That matters, and we come back to it below.

What actually counts as a business here

Only businesses registered for VAT or PAYE are counted. A very small firm that is under both thresholds does not appear.

This is the single thing people get wrong when they quote these figures. The ONS count of about 2.86 million active businesses is not the number of businesses in the country. It is the number that shows up in the tax system.

The wider count, published by the Department for Business and Trade, is 5.7 million private sector businesses at the start of 2025. The difference is mostly one-person firms with no staff and modest turnover. About 4.3 million of that 5.7 million employ nobody but the owner.

So there are two right answers, and they answer different questions:

• 2.86 million is roughly how many businesses trade at a scale the tax system sees.
• 5.7 million is roughly how many businesses exist at all.

If you sell to firms that can afford you, the smaller number is usually the more honest one.

The newest numbers, quarter by quarter

The ONS also publishes a quarterly count, and it moves around a lot more than the annual one.

• April to June 2026: 79,325 openings, up 2.2% on the same quarter a year before. 76,840 closings, up 2.0%.
• January to March 2026: 78,650 openings, down 8.0% on the year before. 83,195 closings, down 1.1%.

Read those two quarters together. Openings dropped hard in the first quarter, then came back in the second. Closings ran ahead of openings in the first quarter, then fell behind again in the second.

The lesson is not "the market is booming" or "the market is dying". The lesson is that one quarter tells you very little. Look at four.

Which trades open the most, and which shut the most

Opening and closing rates vary far more by trade than they do by year.

Here are the 2024 rates for a few of the main groups:

• Transport and storage: 15.6% opened, 16.5% closed. The busiest trade in both directions, and the only one on this list that shut more than it opened.
• Accommodation and food: 14.9% opened, 12.9% closed.
• Business administration and support: 14.4% opened, 13.5% closed.
• Retail: 11.4% opened, 10.9% closed.
• Finance and insurance: 6.6% opened, 6.7% closed. The quietest trade in both directions.

Two very different markets sit in that list. Transport and storage churns: lots of new firms, lots of firms gone. Finance and insurance barely moves at all.

That difference should change how you sell. In a churning trade, a list goes stale in months and the opportunity is the new arrival. In a still trade, the same firms are there year after year and the opportunity is patience.

Why the two numbers sit so close together

Because the total number of businesses in the UK changes slowly, even though the businesses themselves change fast.

This is the part people miss. An 11.1% opening rate and a 9.8% closing rate look like a quiet year. Underneath, nearly 600,000 businesses either arrived or left. About one in five firms on that count was involved in one or the other.

Stability at the top, churn underneath. If your customer list is a year old, a chunk of it is already wrong.

What this means if you sell to businesses

Three practical things.

New firms are a real, renewable market. Roughly 6,000 businesses reach that count every week. They have no supplier for most things yet. We wrote about the timing of that in first 90 days: selling to companies the week they incorporate.

Old lists rot faster than people think. Around one in ten firms drops off every year, and that is before you count the ones that moved, changed name or stopped answering the phone.

Pick your trade with the rates in front of you. If you sell to transport and storage, plan for churn. If you sell to finance, plan for a long courtship.

Which regions produce the most new firms is a separate question, and the answer is not simply London. That one is covered in where new UK businesses are being created.

How long do they last

Of the businesses that opened in 2019, 38.4% were still going five years later.

So roughly three in five were gone inside five years. That is not a sign of a broken economy. It is the normal shape of business ownership, and it has looked much the same for years. Survival splits hard by trade and by region, which is worked through in UK business survival rates by industry.

Where these numbers come from, and how to check them

All of the annual figures above are from the ONS bulletin *Business demography, UK: 2024*, published on 20 November 2025. The quarterly figures are from the ONS quarterly business demography series, most recently for April to June 2026, published on 30 July 2026. The 5.7 million total is from the Department for Business and Trade's *Business population estimates 2025*.

Two habits worth having. Always check which year a figure describes, because the annual bulletin lands almost a year after the year it covers. And always check whether a number is a count or a rate, because 317,000 and 11.1% are the same fact wearing different clothes.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

From a statistic to a list of names

The numbers above describe a market. They do not name anybody in it.

That part is also public. Every company on the UK public record has a name, an address, a trade code and a start date. Leadistry reads that record. It then finds the working website and a verified business email for each firm. You pick the trade, the area and the age. You get names instead of percentages.

Counting is free, so you can size your own market before you spend anything. Start free with 25 leads and see how many firms match the slice you have just been reading about.